So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thin...g is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first--and all this for trifles that no man really needs!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or b...elieve to be beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement; a sanded floor and whitewashed walls ...and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the same with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as th...e blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts ...have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the distinctions among the arts are distinctions among the sensorial directions of aesthetic expression (sight, speech, hearing...), the visual arts crystallize a state of mind at its farthest point, where it borders on the images of things. The verbal arts seem instead to arrest the uncertain impression which a state of mind produces in us before it assumes that simplification which is able to reconcile it with space and make it a visual image. One is reminded of what Matthew Arnold said, that "poetry is more intellectual than art, more interpretative ... poetry is less artistic than the arts, but in closer correspondence with the intelligential nature of man, who is defined, as we know, 'a thinking animal'"; poetry thinks and arts do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romanti...c, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is w...ind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »